Were the Nazis Building Super Weapons?

There are an entire host of conspiracy theories out there that involve the Third Reich and whatever supposed technologies the Nazis may have been designing during the Second World War. Ranging from nascent physics and aeronautics capable of producing flying saucers and elaborate underground bases, to the possibility that the Nazis had been planning their own design for a WMD on par with the Manhattan Project, there are a number of theories as to what, precisely, Hitler and his minions may have had in the works.

In 2010, the Daily Mail reported on alleged sighting of a “mysterious flying disc” seen in 1944 as it flew at low altitude over the River Thames, which was reported in prestigious sources that included the New York Times. Interestingly, there were said to have been photographs that accompanied the NYT story, detailing the craft’s path as it proceeded “at high speeds over the city’s high-rise buildings.”

Could such strange technologies really have been utilized by the Nazis prior to the end of the War? Surprisingly, while there is at least some anecdotal evidence that supports this, there may have been far more destructive technologies than supposed “flying discs” that the Nazis may have been developing.

The Mystery of the Nazi Discs

According to the Daily Mail article from 2010, the Germans had supposedly been developing plans for putting their flying discs in the airspace over Europe:

“[T]he Germans destroyed much of the paperwork on their activities but in 1960 in Canada UFO experts managed to recreate the device which, to their amazement, ‘did actually fly’.

The project was called the Schriever-Habermohl scheme. Rudolf Schriever was an engineer and test pilot, Otto Habermohl an engineer. It was based in Prague between 1941 and 1943.

Initially a Luftwaffe plan after Hitler ordered his airforce chief Hermann Goering to come up with a super-weapon, it was eventually taken over in 1944 by [Hans] Kammler.”

Hans Kammler (right), a high-ranking officer of the SS, had been placed directly in charge of the Nazi’s V-2 missile program toward the end of the War, though by 1942 he had already had a hand in the majority of the secret engineering projects the Nazis had been undertaking. These included advanced aviation projects, as well as Nazi underground bases, concentration camps, and other facilities for which clearance levels had been ultra-sensitive.

Opponents of the Nazi–UFO connection have argued, however, that if the Nazis had indeed been developing super weapons during the war, it is strange that their field-tested aircraft, captured by Allied forces following the War, were often inferior in terms of their structural integrity, employing wooden structures within cockpits that could have benefited greatly from the sturdiness that metal framework would provide. Of course, the reason for such material deficiencies had much to do with the fact that Nazi resources had been dwindling greatly toward the end of the conflict; arguably then, it would have been difficult for the Nazis to construct anything as advanced as the flying discs many purported to be seeing.

In large part, albeit curiously, the stories of Nazi flying discs appearing during wartime (and even those featured by more credible sources for such claims) would only be published following World War II. As researcher Kevin McClure had written of this angle to the mystery, there is literally “not one claim of flying Nazi discs [that] pre-dates 1949 and the increased US media interest in reports of flying saucers.” While this could suggest that the technologies underlying such craft had been regarded as highly secretive–especially during the War–the very fact that such stories of Nazi UFO technologies remain conspiracy theories today seems to warrant the idea that these technologies would still be considered highly secretive even in the present day. Thus, it would have been odd that mainstream media sources would be providing commentary on the alleged appearances of such craft.

On the other hand, what if the “appearances” of Nazi flying discs during the War Years had never really occurred, but instead these reports were fabricated for purposes of propaganda? How better to evoke paranoia from an enemy nation than to have a major media source carry stories about the alleged appearances of Nazi secret weaponry which, arguably, had seen a continuance with the ongoing reports of flying saucers throughout the late 1940s and into the height of the Cold War years. Nothing might be of greater concern to any major superpower than to create a public impression that the Nazis may have harnessed secretive technologies… and that someone else might have captured these technologies after the War, improved them, and was now putting them to good use.

Hitler’s Atom Bomb

While the debate over whether Nazi scientists were building flying saucers remains inconclusive, it is without question that the Reich had their sites on another potentially devastating technologies. In fact, while it is widely understood that the development of atomic weaponry by the United States had been the key technological development that turned the tides in favor of the allies, there is some evidence that suggests the Nazis were working on developing their own devastating nuclear technology.

On April 15, 1945, a German submarine Type XB U-boat known as U-234 departed from Kristiansand on a course for Japan, carrying along with their German crew a pair of Japanese Lieutenant commanders and two aircraft specialists. But of greater interest than their unique “guest” passengers had been the half ton of uranium oxide later recovered by Allied forces, upon the submarine’s surrender off the coast of Newfoundland one month later. (Radio contact with the captain of a sister vessel, German U-873, had resulted in a message confirming that Adoph Hitler had been killed, hence the decision of the crew of U-234 to surrender to America).

While the discovery of the large amount of uranium oxide aboard U-234 suggested that the Nazis may have intended to use it for a super-weapon, this information was suppressed throughout the majority of the Cold War years; it is nonetheless suspected that the recovered uranium stock contributed to the atomic weapons being developed in the states under the Manhattan Project. Researcher Joseph P. Farrell has taken the theory a bit further, developing a hypothesis that involves scenarios such as the spiriting of Nazi uranium out of Germany, which was deliberately handed off to American forces in an agreement that could have promised immunity to some of the compliant German officers. Other information that has appeared over the years in various affidavits and official testimony suggests that at least one test of a high-powered explosive device over the Baltic Sea may have occurred before the end of the War, further lending to the fire under the theories of a Nazi bomb.

So had the Nazis actually managed to build a functional WMD? Again, the notion seems remote… at least when we look at a conventional interpretation of history. Somehow, the obvious facts have managed to elude most, but certainly not all. In an article from the British Daily Mail dated July 13, 2011, the discovery of 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste material in an abandoned salt mine 2000 feet below the Earth’s surface led to new evidence regarding the extent of the Nazis’ supposed nuclear program:

“A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 ‘our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb.’

“This has sent shock waves through historians who thought that the German atomic programme was nowhere near advanced enough in WW2 to have produced nuclear waste in any quantities.”

This new information, paired with the discovery of data that alleges a bomb had actually been detonated, does seem to point toward the historical accuracy of theories that propose the Nazis had taken the necessary steps toward weaponizing their nuclear program:

Although the war hampered their work, by the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 Nazi scientists had achieved a significant enrichment in samples of uranium.

Mark Walker, a US expert on the Nazi programme said: ‘Because we still don’t know about these projects, which remain cloaked in WW2 secrecy, it isn’t safe to say the Nazis fell short of enriching enough uranium for a bomb. Some documents remain top secret to this day.

‘Claims that a nuclear weapon was tested at [the Baltic island of] Ruegen in October 1944 and again at [the Ohrdruf underground bunker complex in Thuringia] in March 1945 leave open a question, did they or didn’t they?’

Today, the history of the Western World as we know it certainly remains incomplete, and with a large amount of secrecy still appended to various clandestine programs the Nazis may have been undertaking, it stands to reason that far more may have been going on behind the scenes than many today even realize. This almost certainly had to do with weapons of mass destruction that could have been on par with what the United States used to end the conflict with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in all likelihood, there are other facets of the Nazi intelligence that still remain hidden from public view… one can only guess what elements have managed to keep safely out of view of our mainstream history up until now; but despite remaining hidden, it is also likely that these innovations–whatever they may have been–have continued to have their technological influence on society, albeit in secretive fashion, since the end of the last great global conflict in modern history.